On Tue, 17 Jul 2018 10:51:38 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > in which Python3's honor is defended in a good many of the discussions > in this newsgroup: anger, condescension, ridicule, name-calling.
You call it defending Python 3's honour. I call it responding to people who insist on spreading misinformation and falsehoods even when given the correct details. Some people have their self-image wrapped up in being able to portray themselves as a maverick who, almost alone, sees through the "lies" about <insert technology here> to see "the truth". Others prefer reality instead, and get upset when false facts are repeated, over and over again, as truth. If instead you want to discuss actual concrete areas where Python's text/ bytes divide hurts, you'll find that there are plenty of people who agree. Especially if they have to write string-handling code that needs to run under both 2 and 3. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again. The Python 3 redesign was done to fix certain common, hard-to-diagnose problems in string handling caused by Python2's violation of the Zen "in the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess". (Python 2 guesses what encoding you probably mean when it comes to strings and bytes, and when it gets it right it is convenient, but when it gets it wrong, it is badly wrong, and hard to diagnose and fix.) It impossible to improve the text handling experience for every single programmer writing every single kind of program under every single set of circumstances. Like any semantic change, there are going to be winners and losers, and the core devs' position is that if the losers have concrete and backwards-compatible suggestions for improving their experience (e.g. re-adding % support for byte strings) they will consider them, but going back to the Python 2 misdesign is off the table. -- Steven D'Aprano "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
